A Stillness in Bethlehem(51)

When it was over, he had made his usual request, demanded the thing he liked to demand above all else. Candy had welts on her back and calves and across her breasts. The dark areas around her nipples felt bitten and swollen and set on fire. Reggie had her put on a small white frilly apron that started at her waist and didn’t quite cover her abdomen. Then he had her put on the garter belt he had bought her and the silk stockings and the four-inch spike-heeled shoes. That was the way he had dressed her last year when he had taken the picture he had sent to the “Beaver Hunt” section of Hustler magazine. Before he’d set up the camera, he’d made her sit on the table and spread her legs. Candy had always thought of that picture as the very last word on her life, the thing that named her. You are not a woman, that picture said. You are a hole.

Reggie was lying on the couch in the living room, watching Oprah Winfrey and pretending to have a fever. He wanted a bottle of Molson’s Golden Ale and a bowl of potato chips. Candy put them both on a tray and brought them out from the kitchen, moving carefully so she didn’t spill anything. Spilling something could get Reggie started all over again, and spilling something would be easy. She had never really learned to walk in these shoes.

Candy put the tray down on the coffee table at Reggie’s side. Usually, by this point in one of their bad days, she would be feeling totally washed out, nonexistent, invisible. She would at least be giving herself a mental lecture, telling herself she had to stop being so stupid, had to learn not to provoke him, had to get her act together so she wouldn’t do the things that made sessions like this necessary. Today, she wasn’t. Today, she was gliding along in total numbness, her body still, her mind silent.

“Do you want anything else I can get you?” she asked Reggie. “We’ve got sour cream. I could make onion dip.”

“Onion dip will give me gas,” Reggie said. “I told you I was sick, for Christ’s sake. What are you trying to do to me?”

“If you don’t need anything else, I’d like permission to go back to the kitchen. The stove needs cleaning.”

“You need cleaning,” Reggie said. “To hell with the stove.”

“Do you want me to take a bath?”

“You’re going to have to take a bath before you go pretend to be a movie star tonight. If you go looking like you are, they’ll probably fire you and find somebody else.”

Candy shifted a little on her feet, redistributing the pain. These shoes always hurt. Listening to Reggie talk about the Nativity committee getting someone else for her part panicked her. Candy kept expecting it to happen. She was astounded that it hadn’t happened yet.

Reggie stuffed a handful of potato chips in his mouth. “What’s that book you left out there in the kitchen? Since when do we have money for you to throw away on trashy paperbacks?”

“We don’t,” Candy said virtuously. She was lying. She had seen the book in the window of the used-book place on Carrow for days, and finally she’d stolen enough change from Reggie’s pockets to buy it. “I borrowed it from the reading room over at the Congregational Church the time we went there to rehearse because they were putting on some children’s thing in the auditorium. It’s something to do when I’m waiting around backstage.”

“Why do you need something to do?”

“Because it’s boring. Just sitting there, I mean.”

“Why don’t you talk to people? It’s just too damn bad this happened to you instead of me. You’re too stupid to make anything out of it. Practically everybody important in town is in that play or has something to do with it. If it was me, I’d get to know them. I’d get myself a few opportunities.”

“You’re not supposed to talk backstage when the play is going on,” Candy said, “and all they ever talk about between acts is the shootings. I don’t have anything to say about the shootings.”

“You don’t have anything to say about anything. It’s too damn bad. It really is. It’s just too damn bad. I wish I was the one who’d shot ’em, though. I wouldn’t have bothered old Dinah Ketchum. I’d have gone straight for those two dykes down the road.”

“Everybody in the play says it was Jan-Mark Verek getting rid of his wife so he could marry that Gemma Bury who’s the priest now at the Episcopal Church. They’re supposed to be very much in love.”

Reggie stuffed more potato chips into his mouth and followed them with a swig of beer. “Love crap. She’s an old bag. His wife was an old bag, too, but why kill one old bag for another?”